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Monday, July 7, 2014

A Lesson From Annie Dillard: A Good Life versus a Life of Good Days

There is no shortage of good days.It is good lives that are hard to come
by.A life of good days lived in
the senses is not enough.The life
of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more.The life of the spirit requires less and
less; time is ample and its passage sweet.Who would call a day spent reading a good day?But a life spent reading – that is a
good life.

She
is, of course, talking about the routine of the creative life—the need for
consistency and habits of work through which the writer can create works of
astonishing power.It made me
reflect on the difference between being a tourist—living a life of good days
experienced through the senses—versus residing in a place and coming to know
and participate in its true spirit. It is what has driven us to vacation every year in the same
small town in Maine and, after retirement, to remain in the community where I
had been a student, a professional, a husband, a parent, and a
grandparent.A community, as
Wendell Berry points out, is a set of local inter-relationships.

But—perhaps
because of my own habits—her words also made me reflect on what we do in higher
education. So much of our
undergraduate curriculum, it seems, is tourism.We visit history era by era. We read the modern American writers, then move on to the
English writers of the 18th century and travel on to the American
Romantics, stopping by Mark Twain along the way.We take a river tour of chemistry, physics, and biology
without leaving the boat.We read
about sociology.We read about psychology.We get through math.At the end, we return home from a
journey of good days and find that nothing has changed, but that the mailbox is
full of bills to pay.

The
challenge for college and university educators is how to help students turn a
journey of good days into a good life.Education—especially the general education core—cannot
be just about gathering knowledge like so many mementos.It must be about helping students learn
to integrate knowledge into their lives as members of a community.This is especially an issue as we move
further into the Information Revolution.In response to the Industrial Revolution, higher education transformed
the classical liberal arts curriculum—which focused on “the discipline and furniture
of the mind” (according to the Yale faculty back in the 1820s)—by greatly
expanding the subjects studied, adding the social sciences and laboratory
sciences, for instance.However,
there was still a focus on “the canon” in most disciplines.A generation into the Information
Revolution, we now can easily see that our students are confronted with a maze
of information.The challenge is
to help students develop the skills of finding information, evaluating that
information, turning it into useful knowledge, and then applying that to the
problems facing them and their communities.One can argue that this has always been the end goal
of general education, but, in an Information Society, these are essential life
skills, not the by-products of education.The test of a modern general education curriculum must
be that we produce good citizens, not just experienced tourists.

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About Me

For the past four decades, I have been involved in media-based distance
education at Penn State and the University of Maryland University
College. I am a 2010 Sloan Consortium Fellow and a 2004 inductee into
the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame. In 2009,
I received the Prize of Excellence for Lifetime Contributions to the
Field by the International Council for Open and Distance Education.